The sun and the glance

Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetry as a self-portrait
by Luigi Lo Cascio, from the poetical works of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini enjoyed a long and uninterrupted relationship with poetry. “We have first and foremost lost a poet" cried Moravia following the death of his friend - thus choosing, from the numerous manifestations of Pasolini’s brilliant talents (intellectual, novelist, filmmaker, critic, essayist, playwright), to give prominence to his poetry.
Poetry is certainly present in his plays, all written in verse, as it is in his cinema, which, in point of fact, he himself defined as ‘the cinema of poetry’. Yet here, as we endeavor to sketch something akin to a self-portrait of the man, we will refer exclusively to Pasolini’s poetic production in the strict sense of the term, which is to say, his vast collection of poems. What emerges is one continuous discourse which lays bare, in the full, bright glare of the sun, a portrait of himself in which every anomaly, every inconsistency and every blatant and rampant contradiction is revealed for all the world to see.
Luigi Lo Cascio